Beat generation

The term beat generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to the novelist John Clellon Holmes (who published an early novel about the beat generation, titled Go, in 1952, along with a manifesto of sorts in the New York Times Magazine: "This is the beat generation"). The adjective "beat" (introduced by Herbert Huncke) had the connotations of "tired" or "down and out", but Kerouac added the paradoxical connotations of "upbeat", "beatific", and the musical association of being "on the beat".

Quotes

: "The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked."

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::- Amiri Baraka

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:"But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don’t understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind’ll blow it back."

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::- Jack Kerouac

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:"Three writers does not a generation make."

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::- Gregory Corso

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:"Nobody knows whether we were catalysts or invented something, or just the froth riding on a wave of its own. We were all three, I suppose."

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::- Allen Ginsberg (quoted in Great Poets Howl: A Study of Allen Ginsberg's Poetry, 1943-1955 ISBN 3820477616)

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:"Once when Kerouac was high on psychedelics with Timothy Leary, he looked out the window and said, 'Walking on water wasn't built in a day.' Our goal was to save the planet and alter human consciousness. That will take a long time, if it happens at all."

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::- Allen Ginsberg

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